[lit-ideas] Re: not even wrong, says...
- From: Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 15:18:17 +0600
For Kant, noumena, of which the big three are the self, world and God,
are products of intellect and therefore only ideas of reason. These
are not things to which one relates, as though one could have
experience of them, but rather schemata, or ways in which the
intellect organizes experiences solely for practical purposes. Noumena
do not provide knowledge or understanding, which are possible only
through experience, but rather general guidance for action. We
construct ideas about having a self, there being a world governed by
natural laws, and a God who ultimately ensures the coherence of those
natural laws with human freedom, in order to articulate the conditions
for the possibility of acting morally. These ideas are constructed by
human beings because they are useful, and perhaps necessary, but they
are constructions. As Kant goes on and on about in both the Critique
of Pure Reason and Religion Within the Limits of Reason, it is really
quite important to distinguish between the constructive work that goes
on within understanding to produce knowledge, and the constructive
work that goes into ideas of reason to produce schematizations to
serve practical reason. Because they are noumena, reason can neither
affirm that they do or do not exist. And perhaps that is the
confusion. For Kant, to assert that the self or the world is an
imaginative construction does not imply that they do or do not exist.
On a different note, I find it difficult to see how one can deny the
role of the imagination in Kant's thought. One may reject the "it's
all constructed, so nothing is real" interpretation, but from its role
in the possibility of experience to the schematization of ideas of
reason, the imagination is crucial for Kant.
Sincerely,
Phil
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